“It’s a pagan ritual to worship Satan and call him forth to the Earth, and the liberal elites have added socialism to it,” declares the Minnesota moron, who apparently added the last few words to blame Obama. “We are in the end days, and we must purify our nation if we are to be welcomed into the kingdom of God.”

Oh my.

Perhaps someone should enlighten the somehow-elected Bachmann that Halloween falls on the evening before the Christian holy days of All Hallow’s Day and All Soul’s Day, Nov 1 and 2. These three days are collectively referred to as “Hallowmas,” a time for honoring saints and wishing well (aka, hoping or praying) for the recently departed souls who still are sitting on a bench in heaven’s waiting room.

Or some such make-believe silliness.

The same woman who railed about how the founding fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States” claimed that gay marriage is the biggest issue facing our nation in the past 30 years and insists. “If we took away the minimum wage … we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level,” is now warning Americans about her imaginary boogeyman.

OK, I guess I should tell you at this point that some of the above is not true.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, Bachmann did indeed say everything in the previous paragraph about slavery, gay marriage and the minimum wage, but the Halloween bit was pure fabrication.

But you believed it, didn’t you?

Don’t worry, so did thousands of others last week when the story was published on www.freewoodpost.com. Basically the same type of satire we’ve seen almost daily from websites like The Onion and the Daily Currant, the fake Bachmann story imprinted upon brains around the world in minutes, feeding the gullibly hungry with anything and everything to reinforce their already entrenched positions.

So don’t feel too stupid if you fell for it, even if only for the few moments of research it took to discover the truth.

It took me all of 30 seconds.

Further blurring the line between religion and politics, these phony stories only prove our internal desires to see what we want to see regardless of what’s actually in front of our eyes and hear what we want to hear regardless of the actual sounds heading in our general direction.

And that, ladies and gents, is far scarier to me than anything conjured up for Halloween.

Richard Carnes, of Edwards, writes a weekly column. He can be reached at poor@vail.net.

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